GUEST COLUMNIST: The evils of slavery should never be forgotten

By Oscar Tucker

Sunday

Feb 24, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Slaves moan and cry out from the grave and beyond to have their muted voices heard. The full unadulterated story of chattel slavery in the United States needs to be known by every American generation. It was not a fantasy or a horror movie concocted by movie moguls, with swash-buckling white men having their way with uncivilized half naked black men, women and children.

Slaves moan and cry out from the grave and beyond to have their muted voices heard. The full unadulterated story of chattel slavery in the United States needs to be known by every American generation. It was not a fantasy or a horror movie concocted by movie moguls, with swash-buckling white men having their way with uncivilized half naked black men, women and children.Slavery, the ugliest, most despicable, most excruciatingly painful and totally indefensible chapter in American history, was real. In the same way the Jewish community keeps the Holocaust ever present, Americans of all backgrounds should know that slavery happened and come to terms with the legacy that horrible institution spawned.I have a moral obligation to God, my ancestors and humankind to shout this evil atrocity from the highest peaks, lest it happen again. We must understand specifically what occurred and eventually reconcile the horror left in its wake.There are those who acknowledge slavery, but make every effort to keep it out of sight and out of mind, perhaps because it was so hideous and because we are still so segregated. The Huffington Post reports elements in Tennessee and Texas are trying to eliminate and/or revise portions of American history to reflect events and outcomes they think are more compatible with the beliefs of neo-secessionists and those sympathetic to the Southern “Lost Cause.”The conservative Texas state board of education has approved massive changes to its school textbooks to put slavery in a more positive light. A group of tea party activists in Tennessee is seeking to remove, from textbooks, references to slavery and mentions of the country’s founders being slave owners.I know of no such effort in Alabama, but in this charged political atmosphere, with a black president and an ultraconservative GOP-dominated state government, I would not be surprised if a movement in that direction has started. Slavery in America is not ancient history. I have personal tangible knowledge of my living breathing great-grandparents who were slaves. In the scope of American history, therefore, slavery was like yesterday. Most children in the United States do not know that the overwhelming majority of American blacks are descendants of chattel slaves. Their parents, our schools and the media do not tell them. United States history textbooks deliberately avoid a decent treatment of the subject.The problems of blacks in America are myriad. Like other population segments, many problems are self-inflicted, and others caused by forces beyond their control; but a conspiracy to make them historically invisible, intentionally or unintentionally, is real and offensive. I have superficially examined the history textbooks used in an Alabama public school system and found subject matter related to slavery insignificant.At the ninth-grade level, for instance, United States slavery, its abolition and Reconstruction are treated on two of 715 pages of text. In the 10th and 11th grades, six pages of 1,100-plus pages of text are devoted exclusively to slavery in the United States. This is probably typical of Alabama public school textbooks concerning slavery. President George W. Bush said, “Nobody can understand this country without understanding the African-American experience.” The exceptionality of the black experience in America distinguishes blacks from any other American ethnic or racial group. Black history month is a laudable attempt to do justice for the hardship and suffering endured by blacks as they contributed to the establishment and development of our great nation.There is much to be said for a month of remembering, but a month is too little. Surely the black race contributed more to United States history than Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee, both traitors to their country, yet they are not relegated to the trash heaps of history. That is because those sympathetic to them write the history and have the ability and influence to get it disseminated and read. The Federal Writers’ Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, assembled a collection of more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery under the title, “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938.” Bob Greene, CNN contributor, reviewed the narratives and reported that the former slaves who were still alive in the 1930s were the youngest of those who were enslaved before emancipation.Many of them were relating childhood or adolescent memories, while others were passing on what their parents related to them. There were many, however, old enough to have vivid firsthand recollections of specific instances. Greene cited several examples, including Mary Armstrong and Stearlin Arnwine. Armstrong, 91, and living in Houston, Texas, when interviewed said, “The person who owned her family was so mean he never would sell the man and woman and (children) to the same one. He’d sell the man here and the woman there and if (there were children) he’d sell them someplace else.” Arnwine, 94, and living near Jacksonville, Texas, when he was interviewed, said he would see slaves on the auction block, stripped to the waist for inspection by potential buyers. Women and their children, he said, would be crying and begging “not to be separated,” but it did no good: “They had to go.”These are illustrations of the unique African-American experience to which President Bush referred, and should be required reading in America’s public schools. Anybody who can read these narratives and remain unaffected by the quiet starkness of the telling is heartless and like the slave masters, callous and pitiless. Slavery persisted like an all consuming cancer, in the United States, for almost 250 years. Death in many instances was a welcome reward for many of those wretched souls. Blacks in the United States had no black historians. They were forbidden education by a society, particularly a white Southern aristocracy that glorified itself as pious and God-­fearing. But their actions were monstrous, racist and inhumane. In the name of God, they held blacks in bondage for the better part of 250 years (1619-1863). Then they added insult to blasphemy by stunting black progress for almost 100 more years (1877-1965), with laws enacted for the specific purpose of denying black people their civil rights and their humanity. The effects of this long horrific siege on the psyche of blacks have been disturbing, but this strong and proud people survived with a bruised but intact morality and chose forgiveness rather than vengeance on the perpetrators of their misery and affliction. The state of Mississippi this month ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (officially ending slavery), 148 years after official approval. At last!Black history month needs to be replaced with nothing less than required semester length courses taught at middle and high school levels. At these levels slavery, Jim Crow the modern civil rights era and related subject matter can be retrieved from the dark corners of oblivion and taught and debated in the bright light of public scrutiny 12 months a year. American slaves will never be paid for their suffering. This small but necessary gesture could serve as an apology and as reparations for the egregious sin committed against them. These would be giant steps toward understanding the ­African-American experience and, in turn, understanding the country as President Bush suggests. As improbable as it may seem to some Americans, slavery could happen again. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), a British statesman and philosopher generally viewed as the philosophical founder of modern political conservatism stated, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” That is one of many abundant reasons to add specific courses to our public school curricular that give exhaustive treatment to United States slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, the modern civil rights era and related subject matter. Mournful voices from our checkered past demand it.

Oscar Tucker is a retired Tuscaloosa educator. Readers can email him at otucker@comcast.net.

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